Robert A. Lisak

Robert Lisak is a photographer based in New Haven. He has done a wide range of work for commercial, architectural and non-profit clients, as well as pursuing his personal work for the past twenty five years.

Robert is a member of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and has an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art.

For the past sixteen years he has been an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT, where he created the digital photography courses in the Media Studies Department.

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Center Director Lars Branden became hooked on gene therapy after reading a science magazine in his native Sweden. He has done research at that country’s Karolinka Institue and at Columbia University.

In his lab at West Campus, Lars Branden (right) looked over results with Leena Kuruvilla, Susanne Hasse, and Michael Wyler.

The scientists and staff of the Yale Center for High Throughput Cell Biology come from a variety of backgrounds. Center director Lars Branden is from Sweden and his team includes a former firefighter from Arkansas, a computer scientist from the Ivory Coa

A newly revamped trauma section has seen a doubling of the number of surgeons who provide trauma, critical care and emergency surgery and an increase in the number of patients evaluated and admitted.

Four of the five members of the Block family in this picture, Daniel Block, Jake Block, Aaron Lewis and Beverly Lewis inherited a mutation in the 10th chromosome that causes a severe form of thyroid cancer. They inherited the mutation from Burton Block, the late husband of Alyce Block, seated.

Karen Lewis says she had “absolute confidence” in transplant surgeon Sukru Emre. Emre operated on her son, Christopher, who needed a transplant because of an aneurysm in his liver.

Author Sherwin Nuland in his Hamden, Conn., study: “Because life is finite, we recognize its value.”

The Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine elected new officers in June. From left, Dean Robert Alpern joined Vice President Harold Bornstein Jr., President Jocelyn Malkin, and outgoing President Frank Lobo.

Dean Robert Alpern, left, and outgoing alumni association President Frank Lobo, right, joined Howard Minners and Peter Herbert, who received the Distinguished Alumni Service Award this year.

At the scientific symposium on brain function on June 2, Sreeganga Chandra, top, described the role of a protein in Parkinson’s disease, and Susumu Tomita, above, described the regulation of synaptic strength.

Schlessinger and his wife, Irit Lax, have been working together since the 1980s.

Schlessinger confers with members of his lab team, Satoru Yuzawa and Valsan Mandiyan.

Residents Ashwin Balagopal, Dan Negoianu and Karen Kelley cheer as they score a point in the Quiz Bowl that pitted them against alumni at the first-ever reunion of internal medicine house staff.

Samuel Kushlan moderated the match between residents and alumni.

Ralph Horwitz

Once thought to be the epitome of urban planning, the Route 34 Connector never completed its planned path as a highway to towns in the Naugatuck Valley. Instead it divided New Haven, separating the Hill neighborhood from downtown and the School of Medicine from the rest of the university. Now, armed with a fresh vision, New Haven officials are planning to fill in the highway and build mixed-use developments that include retail businesses, office space and housing.

With very little street-level retail business to draw passers-by, the area around the medical center (6, 7, 10-12) offers few enticements for pedestrians. With both the School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital contemplating or implementing new construction, retail is part of the mix, as are upgrades to a dozen intersections not known for being friendly to pedestrians. Among the changes under way are the Smilow Cancer Hospital (3-5) and two ancillary buildings, a retail corridor along the grassy median that divides Legion Avenue (1-2) and a traffic circle (9) that brings vehicles directly from the Route 34 Connector into the Air Rights Garage (8) and keeps them off side streets.

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Joseph Schlessinger

Joel Smilow, the major donor to the new cancer hospital that bears his name, addresses attendees of the hospital’s opening day celebration.

As Co-Director for Education in the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, physician–scientist Judy Cho, M.D., an expert on the treatment and genetic bases of inflammatory bowel disease, serves as a mentor to junior faculty members who aspire to careers in clinical and translational research.

Surgeon Robert Bell (right) consults with a patient about bariatric surgery options. Once recommended strictly for weight loss, bariatric procedures have recently been found to have other benefits, including rapid and complete remission of type 2 diabetes, obstructive sleep apnea and other obesity-related disorders in a majority of patients, sometimes “before they leave the hospital,” says Bell.

Leo Cooney consults with 103-year-old Katherine Noble, of Wallingford, Conn., at Yale-New Haven Hospital’s Continuing Care Unit. “The families who bring their parents here are very interested in their care—they’re looking for answers, looking for assistance in caring for older relatives,” Cooney says. “We make their care much easier, we answer questions, we help with difficult decisions.”

Anish Sheth is using new tools to better understand motility disorders.

Peter Ellis and Suzanne Lagarde joined forces to launch a local chapter of Project Access, a national organization dedicated to providing free medical care for the uninsured.

(From left) Yale Medical Group’s Harry Aslanian, Priya Jamidar, and Uzma Siddiqui are using powerful new high-resolution microscopes to peer deep into the digestive tract, making it possible to detect cancers at early stages when they can be successfully treated.

Joel Smilow

Students took to the stage as faculty helped them don the white coats that symbolize their entry into the medical profession.

A third generation entered the School of Medicine at this year’s white coat ceremony. Jordan Gruskay, a new first-year, follows in the footsteps of his grandfather, Frank Gruskay, of the Class of 1954, and his father, Jeffrey Gruskay, of the Class of 1981.

In his keynote address, neurologist David Hafler encouraged the incoming students to recognize the passion and curiosity within them, and to pursue it.

Aileen Morrison received a new stethoscope from Christine Walsh, president of the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine. The stethoscopes are a gift from alumni.

A month after he performed a procedure to treat a potentially devastating aneurysm neurosurgeon Ketan Bulsara had a follow-up visit with Norbert Tibeau.

Since Sukru Emre arrived three years ago, 110 liver and 270 kidney transplants have been performed at Yale with best-in-the-nation outcomes for both pediatric and adult patients.

Sherwin Nuland found a second calling when he began writing biographies of historically important doctors.

Tina Poussaint and Valerie Stone became fast friends at the School of Medicine. They are among the first African-American women to receive tenure at Harvard Medical School.

Nils Loewen uses a device known as a slit lamp to detect early glaucoma in patients at the Yale Eye Center (YEC). Along with YEC colleagues, Loewen uses the most advanced devices and noninvasive surgical techniques to treat the disease in later stages if it cannot be managed by medication.

Toshihara Shinoka and Christopher Breuer met in the 1990s as postdocs at MIT, where they shared an interest in creating bioengineered tissue for use in surgery. Now both are at Yale, where they worked on the first implantation of a bioengineered heart vessel in the United States.

In the lunch room at the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center (YCVRC), faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students can mingle informally.

Jonathan Koff

Jonathan Koff, director of the Yale Adult Cystic Fibrosis Center, examines a patient. Koff attributes the center’s success in treating patients to a number of factors, including better diagnostic methods.

Marna Borgstrom, CEO of Yale-New Haven Hospital, and Christopher O’Connor, president and CEO of the Hospital of Saint Raphael, sign the final agreement to make official the integration between the two historic New Haven-based hospitals.

Marna Borgstrom, CEO of Yale-New Haven Hospital, and Christopher O’Connor, president and CEO of the Hospital of Saint Raphael, sign the final agreement to make official the integration between the two historic New Haven-based hospitals.

Judson Brewer leads a meditation session at the School of Medicine.

During his long career, geneticist Sherman Weissman has focused on genome-wide mapping of gene activity and chromosome structure in humans. “We have so much data, and a very large part of it hasn’t been fully exploited,” he says.

Mark Gerstein played a key role in an international project that elucidated many of the functions of the 99 percent of the human genome that does not code for proteins. Gerstein and his team unraveled the complex network of working relationships among genes and their regulators.

Mark Gerstein led a Yale team that explored networks of DNA that don't code for proteins, but perform other vital functions.

Valerie Reinke studies the roundworm C. elegans and focuses on functional element identification in that organism. Advances in technology made the ENCODE project possible, she says, and are making it practical to look at genetics on an individual level. “We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface,” she says.

Marna Borgstrom and Christopher O’Connor signed the agreement that sealed Yale-New Haven Hospital’s purchase of the Hospital of Saint Raphael.

Donna Riccitelli, a registered technologist in radiology, helps a patient prepare for an X-ray at the Spine Center.

Paul Taheri began his new post as CEO of Yale Medical Group in March. He came to Yale from the University of Vermont, where he prepared the medical practice for the future of health care reform.

Peter Schulam and colleagues in the Department of Urology offer “active surveillance” to men diagnosed with prostate cancer.

(From left) Urologists Peter Schulam and Preston Sprenkle discuss a patient’s case using the Artemis system, which offers new flexibility to men diagnosed with prostate cancer who are not ready to pursue surgical treatment.

Since his arrival at Yale from Oxford in 2003, T. Rob Goodman has led a successful campaign to reduce patients’ exposure to radiation from computerized tomography scans.

Robert Shulman (left) with Todd Constable and Douglas Rothman, co-directors of the Magnetic Resonance Research Center at Yale.

Liane Philpotts uses digital breast tomosynthesis to cut down on false positives and make more accurate diagnoses for breast cancer. Suspicious-looking images can bring back about one patient in 10 for more tests—usually false alarms. But, Philpotts says, “anybody who gets called back thinks the worst.” Tomosynthesis, which was approved by the FDA in 2011 after trials at Yale and other medical centers, is the first technology to deliver three-dimensional images in mammography.

The prostate presents special problems in imaging. Ultrasound guides clinicians to the prostate but can’t image tumors, so clinicians use a combination of MRI and ultrasound to create a 3D model. Peter Schulam (standing), chair of urology, and clinician Preston Sprenkle discuss a case with a patient.

When Dennis Spencer (left) began his career in neurosurgery in the early 1970s, he had two X-ray technologies at his disposal for brain imaging. Now, he says, imaging technology has “revolutionized every field.”

“This is the direction in which we have to go,” said Pietro De Camilli. High-resolution imaging technologies can overcome the diffraction limit that held back advances in cell biology for many years. De Camilli, shown here with a TIRF microscope, uses the new imaging modalities to study how brain cells package neurotransmitters.

This is not your grandparent’s microscope. In their efforts to obtain images of smaller and smaller structures, scientists have moved away from lenses and light to such complex and sophisticated devices as this STED microscope, which relies on fluorescence and laser beams. Joerg Bewersdorf trained in physics, but now works with cell biologists looking for images of ever-smaller cellular structures.

Toomre believes that seeing cells in real time is crucial to understanding human biology. “There are a lot of biological problems that—if you could see them in living cells in action—we would be able to unravel.”

Since incorporating the use of digital tomosynthesis in breast cancer screening, Liane Philpotts and colleagues at the Yale Breast Center have seen an increase in accuracy.

Smaller than a credit card, Fan’s “single-cell, 45-plex protein secretion measurement platform” allows scientists to identify up to 45 proteins secreted by cells. The simple, inexpensive, and portable machine provides more information than other available detectors, and does so with the most minuscule biological samples.

In his lab, Fan has multiple manufacturing stations equipped with pressure tubes to make ultra-high-density antibody microarrays. When coupled with a single-cell microchip, a large panel of proteins in individual cells can be measured.

In his lab, Fan has multiple manufacturing stations equipped with pressure tubes to make ultra-high-density antibody microarrays. When coupled with a single-cell microchip, a large panel of proteins in individual cells can be measured.

In his lab, Fan has multiple manufacturing stations equipped with pressure tubes to make ultra-high-density antibody microarrays. When coupled with a single-cell microchip, a large panel of proteins in individual cells can be measured.

In the Winchester Chest Clinic, medical student Ruth Wang’ondu uses her iPad to check a patient’s chart and recent lab tests. “She finds things out in a quarter of the time it takes me,” says Robert Baltimore, the clinic’s director.

In the Winchester Chest Clinic, medical student Ruth Wang’ondu uses her iPad to check a patient’s chart and recent lab tests. “She finds things out in a quarter of the time it takes me,” says Robert Baltimore, the clinic’s director.

Biomedical engineer Rong Fan has developed a device that reveals a cell’s nature based on the proteins it secretes. “Cells use proteins to talk to each other,” he says. “I wanted to know what they were talking about.”

Biomedical engineer Rong Fan has developed a device that reveals a cell’s nature based on the proteins it secretes. “Cells use proteins to talk to each other,” he says. “I wanted to know what they were talking about.”

Fan has formed a company, IsoPlexis, to commercialize his device. Kara Brower, a recent Yale College graduate who worked in Fan’s lab, is the company’s chief technology officer. Collaborators at Yale, other universities, pharmaceutical companies, and government labs are already using Fan’s invention.

Almost $200 million of Yale’s yearly National Institutes of Health grant support is connected to the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI). YCCI’s leadership includes (from left) William Tamborlane, Kevan Herold, Tesheia Johnson, and Robert Sherwin, as well as Marcella Nuñez-Smith and Rajita Sinha (not pictured).

With the help of her daughter, Sarah, and husband, Chris, Helen Bolan recovered from a stroke caused by a rare condition that results in constriction of arteries in the brain.

With the help of her daughter, Sarah, and husband, Chris, Helen Bolan recovered from a stroke caused by a rare condition that results in constriction of arteries in the brain.